Watch out internet users, as you read this you very well may be setting foot into a war zone. The opposing parties? Spamhaus and Cyberbunker.
A fight that has been escalating between two internet companies has now gotten so large and so vicious that it is literally slowing down the internet that we all use every day. Already people are reporting not being able to reach certain websites for short amounts of time because of these attacks, and if the hostilities persist, even basics like e-mail and online banking may shut down.
This digital war all started with the company Spamhaus, which runs a Domain Name System (DNS). A DNS is the vehicle allowing people to connect a typed-in domain name to the actual server that hosts the website they wish to access. Spamhaus recently blocked the web hosting site Cyberbunker as a preventative measure against internet span, and well, Cyberbunker didn't take too kindly to that.
In retaliation, Cyberbunker is pulling off what many are calling "the biggest cyber-attack in history." Their weapon of choice? Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Spamhaus believes Cyberbunker is currently working with Russian and Eastern European criminal organizations to get their point across.
And it's working. The DDoS attacks are reaching previously unseen levels of power, with Spamhaus receiving sustained attacks of 300 gigabits per second. For reference, a sustained attack of 50 gigabits a second is usually enough to take out a bank. The only reason Spamhaus is still standing is because of it decentralized structure, which helps to spread out the power of such attacks.
''It is a real number,'' says Patrick Gilmore, chief architect at Akamai Networks. ''It is the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the internet.''
The DDoS attacks started around March 19, and have yet to be stopped or even contained. Gilmore claims that these attacks are generated by using swarms of computers known as botnets that produce data streams larger than the internet connection of some countries. The data all floods a particular site at once, essentially creating a traffic jam of information and making it impossible for other, normal users to access the site.
"The No. 1 rule of the Internet is that it has to work," said Dan Kaminsky, a security researcher who has been a long time critic of the DNS. "You can't stop a DNS flood by shutting down those servers because those machines have to be open and public by default. The only way to deal with this problem is to find the people doing it and arrest them."
So far nobody has been able to stop Cyberbunker and its associates, and it very well may be quite a while before this attack begins to let up, if at all. One thing is for certain though. Whereas war between groups of people has always involved physical aggression throughout the course of human history, the 21st century may become the first where whole countries could be taken down with the click of a mouse.
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